Narrating the multiverse in literature, comics, and film

This article expands the existing scholarly work on possible worlds theory to trace the logics of multiverse narratives in literature, comics, television, and film. In considering highly diverse works by authors and producers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, DC Comics, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it demonstrates that the contemporary many-worlds syndrome presents a trans-media re-negotiation of narratological rule systems that is based on a transfer of formats and conditions from literature to comics, television, and film. On the one hand, it facilitates renewed interconnections between extra- and intradiegetical narrative elements, effectively producing intradiegetical narratological cohesion through non-narratological categories. On the other hand, it counteracts said de-hierarchization by introducing a range of cohesion devices that establish connections between the typically disparate domains of rhetoric, form, materiality, and aesthetics in contemporary narratives. It is through this deliberate de- and re-stabilization of narrative modalities that the multiverse effectively alters and reforms the paradigms of contemporary storytelling.